The present invention relates to a system and method for performing autonomous navigation of a vehicle, and more particularly to a technology for recognizing a possibility of collision risk through path estimation of a target vehicle, and generating an autonomous navigation path.
Recently, with rapid development in industry, the number of vehicle users has been rapidly increased. As a vehicle usage time becomes longer, vehicles are more important to modern life. Vehicle drivers usually prefer to stay in a more comfortable environment and have a more convenient life, and thus many vehicle developers and companies have been conducting intensive research in order to increase freight transportation capability and to provide vehicle drivers with a more comfortable life.
Therefore, various systems for protecting vehicle users and passengers, assisting vehicle driving, and improving ride comfort, have been embedded in vehicles.
In recent times, many developers and companies are conducting intensive research into an improved vehicle system configured to allow a vehicle to be autonomously driven instead of being directly driven by a vehicle driver, and are also conducting intensive research into an unmanned vehicle that recognizes a peripheral state and a vehicle state using electric sensors capable of substituting for human senses so that the unmanned vehicle can be autonomously driven.
Various technologies are needed for unmanned vehicles in such a manner that the unmanned vehicles can accomplish given tasks in various environments. However, the most basic technology is an autonomous navigation technology in which a vehicle can autonomously travel to a destination through a safe and optimum path for a shorter time.
The autonomous navigation system for a vehicle recognizes a peripheral situation and a vehicle state while the vehicle travels to a predetermined destination without using driver intention, resulting in implementation of an autonomous navigation of the vehicle.
The autonomous navigation system may include an obstacle recognition step, an obstacle decision step, a traveling-path generation step, and a vehicle control step. The traveling-path generation step has to generate an obstacle avoidance path in real time by detecting a variation of the obstacle, and also has to generate a path in which mechanical movement characteristics of the vehicle is reflected.
In order to more stably perform autonomous navigation on the actual road, a method for recognizing the possibility of collision risk between static and dynamic objects located in a peripheral region is of importance to vehicles.
For this purpose, a hierarchical collision detection scheme can be easily implemented, which estimates paths of a target vehicle and a peripheral vehicle (i.e., a target vehicle), represents a vehicle position for each unit time (e.g., a few seconds) in the form of a polygon, and recognizes the possibility of vehicle collision risk, so that the hierarchical collision detection scheme has been widely used throughout the world. However, according to the above-mentioned hierarchical collision detection scheme, if a predicted path of a moving object is incorrect, the accuracy of collision detection may be deteriorated.
If it is impossible to predict/reflect movement of a peripheral vehicle (i.e., a target vehicle) when the autonomous navigation system generates a traveling path, the path generation process cannot be stably performed, resulting in higher possibility of collision risk.